A walk through social media

on 30 June 2014

Are patients likely to find a dentist via social media? Well, yes, it happens regularly as I found out from social media expert Dawn Kerr. I was lucky enough to recently attend a course run by NBS Training at which Dawn was a guest speaker. Working with and assisted by Tracy Stuart, director of NBS Training, she told delegates that the previous week a rugby player had lost a tooth and gone on to Twitter to get an immediate recommendation. I am already a social media devotee but aware that I need to keep on top of new developments, I signed up to gain some insights from a dedicated social media professional.

Getting social

How do you offer social media training to a room full of people with different levels of experience as well as expectations? The NBS Training course that was recently ran in London – Getting Social! – was attended by a disparate group of dentists and dental marketing personnel, some of whom had considerable knowledge of a particular platform while others were complete beginners.

Dawn was able to illustrate how she operated her own accounts as well as those of her clients so her audience could understand both the whys and the wherefores, satisfying the needs of all levels. Some of the statistics were quite shocking to me – there are 1.3 billion users on Facebook and 232 million on Twitter.

I am sure that many of you are on Facebook and/or Twitter in a personal capacity but what about from a practice point of view? Social media for the dental practice can appear a little frightening in the first instance but Dawn broke it down into more manageable chunks than just a vast monolith of ‘social media’. We learnt how to:

Set up pages/accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and more

Find potential patients on social media

Create great content

Turn connections into patients.

And perhaps most importantly, why we were doing this in the first place.

For me there were quite a few light-bulb moments, from the growing influence of hashtags across all platforms to the finessing of properly targeted promotions. I am going back to my desk better informed and feeling more confident about exploring new areas of social media.

There are plans to run more social media courses later in the year as part of NBS Training’s wide ranging programme. To find out more, call or visit the website.

For more details on the training programmes offered, please visit www.nbstraining.co.uk or call 01438 217944.